An IT consultant who attempted to board a British Airways flight to Dusseldorf at Heathrow's T5 wearing a Transformers t-shirt was told to take off the offending apparel or else, The Sun reports.
Brad Jayakody, 30, was travelling with four colleagues and ill-advisedly decided to sport an image of Optimus Prime wielding a …

OMG!

I mean come on, how the f*** can having a cartoon image of a transformer holding a gun on your t-shirt be reason enough for to be told you would be arrested and unable to get on the plane.

FOR GODS SAKES ITS CLOTHING!

Anyone who agrees that this article is ok and those people were in the right, is part of the same shallow end of the gene pool that the airport security are from, probably still dragging your knuckles along the floor, waiting to evolve into a higher primate. Here's a Banana knock your self out.

This is yet another example of over zealous idiots imposing ridiculous and quite frankly irrational ban's on items of clothing, like a former retarded prime minster Mr Blair did with hooded jumpers aka the dreaded "Hoodie".

"Last year Gatwick guards made a woman hand over a beef sandwich before boarding and last week a PhD student was stopped for wearing a gun-shaped charm necklace at an airport in Canada."

So how dangerous is a beef sandwich? Or a necklace?

-Paris, because she has as much intelligence as the security guards at T-5

WTF?

Idiocy backed into a Corner

It's like this. Some security guy makes an idiot of themselves by making a really stupid decision or saying something outrageous. They won't back down as they'll lose face. The supervisor is called over and as the security guy is their friend and colleague they're unlikely to say the initial action were the actions of a loopy loop. They then defend the action using further dubious excuses and so the chain of idiocy continues right up to the top if necessary.

Words...

A case of .....

.... having lost the plot entirely. This nation's forefathers must be spinning in their graves at the antics and pettiness that is prevalent these days. The operative and their supervisor should immediately be given specialised "Training" in "Not being so bloody stupid" with the follow up course "Stop wasting everyone's time". Following that they should both be issued with a Bog Brush and confined to managing T5's lavatories for the forseeable future.

People like this should not be let out in public. What a pair of utter buffoons.

Cool t-shirt

British Incompetence Ltd (TM)

You couldn't make this stuff up. After the wonderful advert and stupendous press coverage for British Incompetence Ltd that T5 produced you'd think BAA would at least try to inject some kind of common sense into their staff.

But no.

A t-shirt. I still can't believe it. A bloody t-shirt!

I've got an Iron Maiden t-shirt somewhere with "Shoot That Fokker!" on the back (a Fokker is a plane btw for those who don't know). Guess I won't be wearing that anywhere near Heathrow then.

Name and shame the halfwit security people so we know who to look out for and to avoid. Stupidity is dangerous!

Image is everything; substance is nothing

Sure makes things simpler and easier now. Governments can be overthrown, people can be killed and wars can be fought with pictures of weapons. Wow, why didn't I think of that. Of course the admirals and generals will be pissed...no more toys to actually hurt people with.

Customs officer won award for most stupid annoying reason to stop someone

They have "in house" competitions to see who can upset passengers the most. Surely the UK airport security has gone daft in lowering themselves to this ridiculous level? What about t-shirts with pictures of teddy bears – thats surely going to indicate some kind of terrorist rebel, or how about a t-shirt with the word BOMB on it? Very dangerous.

I was stopped in Teeside recently because the bottle of camera lens cleaning solution (<100ml of course) was in the wrong size ziplock bag. Obviously a terrorist threat if ever...

However, anybody can board a plane with 10 kg of sulfuric acid (dehydrated), mix that in the toilets with water and throw it through the cabin once airborne ... just as an example, I mean, they should stop us from taking anything on a plane (shoe laces, belts etc) ... if they were really serious about security, the aircraft interior should look like the cells of mental institutions ...

BTW, it has NEVER been proven that any mobile device (or hard drive device) had interfered with ANY piece of navigational equipment, at least on the US American side! I hold this info from several "senior" aviatation engineers that have carried-out a number of tests on prototype commercial aircraft. [that is why I post anonymous - they hate to upset airlines, who do not want you to start talking to your loved-ones during landing or taxi over a phone ;-)]

Is it not easier to stab somebody with a ballpoint pen than nail scissors, which are usually too short for that?

I hate airports, they are never honest ... always try to talk around the issue ... when a flight is late they say it's late because of the late arrival of the aircraft (in other words, it's late because it's late)

I always think: thank you guyz so much for the info, but can you say why it is late in the first place?!?

These guyz are plain idiots, but don't get me wrong, it's not the poor souls we see in uniform at the security check, nor their managers, it's the brainless decision-makers. Especially in the US, they are the problem, they even enforce that on other nations ... 3 hours boarding time is ridiculous - it used to be 30 minutes ... ;-)

Damn, I cannot wear my stereolab t-shirt, from the "peng!" album ... :(

Like Natalie Imbruglia

I'm torn.

Heathrow is private land and they are within their rights to have a "dress code" if you will. However, the idea that a t-shirt with Optimus Prime on is dangerous, offensive, likely to induce panic/fear etc is ridiculous.

I can understand them causing grief for the fame whores that wear bulky jackets with wires coming out of them, and I can understand them not wishing people to wear clothing that is generally accepted to be offensive (e.g. with profanity), as you can expect children to be present. Pictures of robots, guns, bombs etc though don't seem to fall into either of those categories. At least to me.

Time for a bet with my mates methinks. Must get me a t-shirt printed up before my hols - "suicide is painless" on the front, "as long as you mix the chapatti flour and hydrogen peroxide in the correct ratio" on the back... I won't be flying from LHR mind.

Security? REALLY!

What a Wunch of Bankers

Seriously, I understand that the gits in Government need some security theatre to pretend that they are doing something about the 'terrorist threat' that they created in the UK when we (re)invaded the middle east but exactly where did they hire these muppets? Was there nobody at the Job Centre that day? Primary school children would make more effective security decisions than this lot.

Whilst we are on the subject though, how is it that those expensive new 'smart' body scanners T5 is fitted with, that were supposed to stop all the bullcrap with taking your shoes and everything else off are still being used like the old scanners? There are only three real possibilities;

1) The morons in charge of security are too stupid to tie their own shoelaces and have not trained their staff to use the new kit (of course this begs the question of how they get to work, maybe the employer issue them with slip-ons)

2) The morons in Whitehall want to keep everyone scared of those nasty terrorists (not the people we are victimising or killing, just the completely unconnected terrorists) by subjecting us to laughable security theatre at every available opportunity. Don't forget the War on Terra (TM) got that retard Bush re-elected, no reason for Nu-Labour not to give it a try over here.

3) The smart folks in Whitehall know that we are running out of oil (and invading half of the middle east has backfired and put prices up not down) and that making air travel as unpleasant as possible to reduce the number of flights we take won't get them voted out as fast as the same level of aviation environmental tax.

I suppose...

...it's the "table-leg shooting" all over again. I suppose in a certain light, at the right time of year, when the moon it full and the right number of people present, you could mistake the picture of a gun on a shirt for a real one, but come on?! Just another case of your welcome the 51st state!

Parallel universe

Well, my initial reaction was to check to see if I'd somehow been transported to a parallel universe where it's April 1st every day.

Ok, I can quite see why they'd want to arrest him on grounds of sartorial bad taste and anyone over 10 years old wearing that kind of thing looks definitely suss anyway.

But I have to wonder just what kind of retards BA employ in their management team that finds an image printed on a piece of clothing to be a threat.

"If a T-shirt had a rude word or a bomb on it for example, a passenger may be asked to remove it"

WHY? What rationale can possibly be used to justify this type of bullshit?

Can't we just heard all of the risk averse obsessives onto a walled island somewhere so that the rest of us can get on with life without being constantly subjected to this crap, (put all of the politicians there too while you're at it).

Over zealous security

CCTV Image Processing

I suspect that there might be some form of image processing going on at T5 linked to the CCTV systems, systems that might be trained to recognise the outline of a gun for example. Such systems based on 2D images would, I expect, have difficulty differentiating between a real gun and a picture of one on a T-Shirt.

To avoid false positives, they might give staff a list of banned pictures not allowed to be displayed, without necessarily conveying exactly why they are banned.

This could be the result of such a policy where staff use their discretion to decide what is a gun and what isn't, resulting in the situation we see today.